Raymond Keen

Raymond Keen

Raymond Keen was educated at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Oklahoma. He spent three years as a Navy clinical psychologist with a year in Vietnam (July 1967 – July 1968). Since that time he has worked as a school psychologist and licensed mental health counselor in the USA and overseas, until his retirement in 2006. He is a credentialed school psychologist in the states of California and Washington, and a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Washington. Raymond lives with his
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wife Kemme in Sahuarita, AZ. They have two grown children, Anne-Elise and Michael.

"Love Poems for Cannibals" is the author’s first volume of poetry. He is also the author of a drama, "The Private and Public Life of King Able," which will be published in 2014. Raymond’s poetry has been published in 24 literary journals.

Raymond writes, “I was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. Back in my childhood of the 40’s and my adolescence during the 50’s, I believed in human greatness and human virtue. I had respect for authority, and believed that life was fundamentally fair and could be understood as a rational narrative. I believed that a human being could, through words, come close to expressing the truth, even if only a momentary fragment of this truth. I now realize that I may have been overly optimistic. Human verbal communication characteristically obscures the truth, as it covers the truth with the repetitive cliché. My poetry attempts to make that insight present and palpable and undeniable. Although I sometimes may succeed in getting through or beyond the cliché, I make no claims on truth.”

Connect with Raymond Keen

"Keen’s debut poetry collection arrives at the party already a little drunk, a bit raucous and talking a mile a minute, but the longer the night goes on, the more sense it seems to make. After all, he’s not out to hurt anyone; he’s just trying to figure out where it all went wrong for all of us."

– Kirkus Reviews

AWARDS, PRESS & INTERESTS

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2013: Love Poems for Cannibals

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2013, 2013: Love Poems for Cannibals

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2013, 2013: Love Poems for Cannibals

Hometown
Pueblo, CO

Favorite author
William Shakespeare

Favorite book
Hamlet

Day job
Retired psychologist

Favorite line from a book
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what

Favorite word
Scheiße

Unexpected skill or talent
Stand-up comedy

Passion in life
Philosophical inquiry that examines language as a distortion (reduction) of reality

Keen (Love Poems for Cannibals, 2013) portrays two days in
the life of a paranoid king in this debut play.

King Able is the nominal ruler of his kingdom, but it’s vague how
much power he actually possesses. It’s unclear, even, whether he has any
subjects or courtiers; in Keen’s minimalist three-scene play, Able is the sole
speaker, and the only other characters are masked men who spend much of the
drama leering out from the background, seen by the audience but not by Able
himself. Able’s powerlessness is on display as his royal requests go
unanswered: “Where is the royal catalogue? (Pause. Flamboyance continues.)
Where is the royal thermometer? (Pause.) Bring in the royal book of
phrases. (Long pause.) Where is the court prognosticator? (Pause.)”
The play highlights his insecurity during his daily radio address to the
kingdom; he’s able to keep his composure during his prepared remarks, but when
he’s unable to shut down the microphone afterward, his demeanor cracks into a
paranoid rant that includes his suspicions that the queen is keeping him
prisoner. He eventually decides to make an escape, but the trap he’s in—whether
built by the queen or simply by the playwright—won’t release its prey so
easily. Although the king’s frantic dialogue lies at the heart of the play,
Keen’s precise set and stage directions are arguably more central to its
themes, execution, and emotional resonance. The long silences, use of audio
recordings, and simultaneous actions on different parts of the stage reveal the
work as not a series of monologues but rather an intricately orchestrated
puzzle. Readers are left to simply imagine the effect of all of this in a live
venue, which strips the printed text of some of its power. Upon reaching the
end of this short drama, they will want nothing more than to see a staged
production of it, particularly its final moments. Still, for such a brief work,
Keen manages to pack in an impressive amount of tension and implication,
leaving readers to question who’s really pulling the strings.

Startling, cynical, satirical free verse about life among the postmodern ruins.

Keen’s debut poetry collection arrives at the party already a little drunk, a bit raucous and talking a mile a minute, but the longer the night goes on, the more sense it seems to make. After all, he’s not out to hurt anyone; he’s just trying to figure out where it all went wrong for all of us. With considerable energy and tightly coiled wit, Keen ranges across the political, spiritual and pop-culture landscapes only to find them all a little disorienting and largely bereft. “There is no sadness,” he writes, “But the fear of sadness. / There is no despair, / But the distraction from despair. / There is no suffering, / But the avoidance of suffering. / We’re living in bad times, / Biochemically speaking.” Regardless of where he looks, nothing essential remains. Love is sold “in bottles now, / and smells like aftershave,” Christ is “lost in all the traffic” and “so far away from now.” Even your sense of self is suspect: “In this cellular moment, / This eternity / Among strangers, / You see / Yourself / In bits / And / Pieces, / Impossible to describe.” Trapped by the postmodern condition and yearning for the teleologically secure time “before the world was shattered,” Keen’s narrators respond in seemingly the only way available—playing their own language games, answering absurdity with absurdity and papering over fragmentation with pastiche. Meditations on death are peppered with popular advertising slogans, and the apotheosis of Western civilization is reduced to Michelangelo’s David infested with maggots. With no certainty, even of the self, the poems join in the cannibalizing of culture, seeking irony in unexpectedly ironic situations. Amid the brutality arises humor, and Keen ably joins a long tradition in American avant-garde poetry of lampooning demagoguery with poems like “The Demystification of Henry Kissinger” and “Even at Night All Snakes Swallow Their Prey Whole: Looking Back at Arafat & Some of His Peers.” Supporting the politics, satire and social commentary is a more than capable, sometimes beautiful verse that relies heavily on repetition—from anaphora to choral refrains—and startlingly precise imagery (“sway-backed surgeons, / Peeling human skulls like eggs”) for great effect.

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